Alice In Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond The Mirror in Review – Up is down, left is right and the world is spinning round…

Alice in Wonderland is one m-m-maaaaad story. The adventures of a young girl in the mysterious world have been made into one of the best Disney cartoons and inspired millions of girls around the world to follow the white rabbit. The followup story, Alice Through the Looking Glass, is not as well known, though the recent Tim Burton adaptation certainly will fix this soon. And hot on the heels of the movie is, of course, a companion iPhone release – Alice In Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond The Mirror .

Alice in Wonderland adds to the quite rare genre of Platform/Puzzle game (contrary to the obscenely popular Arcade/Platformer). The game is quite loosely based on the movie, following the adventures of Alice as she tries to find her way back home from the strange and unfamiliar world behind the mirror. And, of course, to aid her in this quest an improbable group — namely the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter– of misfits join forces.

Quite commonly for the platform genre, you control Alice in her efforts to get to the end of the level. Uncommonly though, there is no shooting here and very little enemies as well. There IS a lot of jumping involved however, as well as timely usage of the special abilities of Alice’s companions. These include time freezing with the White Rabbit, making things disappear with the Cheshire Cat, moving stuff with the March Hare and shifting items to the other dimension with the Mad Hatter. The places where you can use these abilities are marked with floating spirals, colour coded to specific abilities.

Alice in Wonderland is a surprisingly challenging puzzler. Despite the hot spots being marked for easy spotting, it’s still quite a test for that grey matter most people call a brain. To make things even more interesting, scattered across the levels are additional devices, like mirrors sending you to the other side of reality or some kind of compasses that allow rotating the whole world around you. And finally there are the ever-threatening card-soldiers you have to avoid.

For the achievement addict Alice in Wonderland has a selection like almost no other. While a lot of the stuff is unlocked from the game itself, after finding dome hidden rooms and solving some exceptionally devious puzzles, some are quite unorthodox. These include items unlocked using the GPS of your iDevice in Disney theme parks around the world, taking pictures of hinted stuff and solving riddles. Of course, while most of these are likely of more interest to the younger part of the iDevice audience, it’s nice that the devs are not afraid of experimenting.

Graphics in Alice in Wonderland don’t do much to blow your mind. The developers tried and mostly succeeded going for the style of the Tim Burton movie. The backgrounds and most of the objects look very detailed and fit in with the setting. My biggest gripe is the main character. While I see the resemblance, I just feel the developers could have done a much better job. The interface is ok as well, with all controls done using a couple of directional buttons, a jump one on the right and an occasional activate in the middle. Abilities are activated with a tap on Alice, which also works well, though on the go I often wished for a separate toolbar to make it easier.

The iPhone to date has quite an exceptional record of quality titles based of various movie franchises and Alice In Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond The Mirror is no exception. The game combines atmospheric graphics and sounds, challenging puzzles and an unusual variety of ways to interact with the world around, with a hefty bit of achievement hunting on top to make a game appealing to both the young and old, the casual and hard core audience. And even if some of the graphical choices might look a bit off to me, there’s no accounting for taste, right?

With this I declare Alice In Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond The Mirror officially touched!